NASA Chief Confident that Manned Mars Mission will Happen Soon

Photo Credit: Reuters If the prospect of spending a thousand days up to 140 million miles away from the Earth was not enough of a deterrent, killer radiation levels and enforced radio silence would surely deter most volunteers from travelling to Mars. Nasa, however, has revealed that near-record numbers are applying for its astronaut training programme, as renewed enthusiasm for space travel is fueled by growing hopes of a manned Mars mission.

Since the successful landing of the Curiosity rover in August, the scientific community has begun to take more seriously a promise from President Obama, made in 2010, to land humans on the surface of Mars within 20 years or so. Some privately-backed rival ventures are even forecasting that they will get to Mars orbit as early as 2018; Nasa plans a deep-space practice mission, to rendezvous with a captured asteroid, by 2025.

“Interest in sending humans to Mars has never been higher,” Nasa’s chief administrator, the former astronaut Charles Bolden, told a conference in Washington on Monday. “‘We now stand on the precipice of a second opportunity to press forward with what I think is man’s destiny, and that is to go forward to another planet.”

Within the next few weeks, Nasa plans to announce which 20 trainee astronauts it has chosen from 6,300 recent candidates – its second-highest application total since the agency was established, in 1958. “These astronauts will be among the first trained specifically for long-duration space flights,” said Bolden.

Despite sweeping US budget cuts under the sequestration, Nasa still hopes for an annual budget of $17.7bn – which will be increasingly targeted on the Mars mission. The agency is seeking congressional approval to outsource to private contractors all future rocket missions to low earth orbit, so it can concentrate on deep space instead.

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In Cold Blood: Cold Case Files Taint Truman Capote Classic

Photo Credit: Steve Schapiro/CorbisTruman Capote’s masterwork of murder, “In Cold Blood,” cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.’s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp. But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an “immaculately factual” recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.

It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero. A long-forgotten cache of Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents from the investigation into the deaths suggests that the events described in two crucial chapters of the 1966 book differ significantly from what actually happened.

Separately, a contract reviewed and authenticated by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Capote in 1965 required Columbia Pictures to offer Mr. Dewey’s wife a job as a consultant to the film version of his book for a fee far greater than the U.S. median family income that year.

The details are to be found in papers from the Clutter case that a now-deceased KBI agent, Harold Nye, carried home with him years ago. Those documents, reviewed in August by the Journal, are the subject of litigation between the adult son of Mr. Nye, who hopes to publish or sell them, and the KBI, which claims to own the material.

Today, the KBI declines to explain the five-day delay in visiting the suspect’s farmhouse or to answer other questions delivered via email as well as by hand to a receptionist at its Topeka headquarters. Over the decades, literary sleuths have turned up numerous journalistic sins in “In Cold Blood,” ranging from minor inaccuracies to outright fabrication. The latest revelations, though, are particularly damaging because they undermine one of the longest-standing defenses of the book: that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation hailed the book as true. Mr. Dewey many times called the book accurate.

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GOP Mega Donor Sheldon Adelson Alleges Obama Has Targeted Him; Funding Romney to Avoid Even More Retaliation Under 2nd Obama Term

[Mega-donor Sheldon] Adelson said that a second Obama term would bring government “vilification of people that were against him.” He thinks he would be at the top of that list, and contends that he already has been targeted for his political activity.

Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. is being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into possible money-laundering in Vegas, and possible violation of bribery laws by the company’s ventures in China, including four casinos in the gambling mecca of Macau. (Amazingly, 90 percent of the corporation’s revenue is now from Asia, including properties in Macau and Singapore.)

The country’s leading mega-donor is irritated by the leaks.“When I see what’s happening to me and this company, about accusations that are unfounded, that kind of behavior … has to stop,” he said.

Adelson gave the interview in part to signal that he intends to fight back in increasingly visible ways. Articles about the investigations appeared last month on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He maintains that after his family became heavily involved in the election, the government began leaking information about federal inquiries that involve old events, and with which the company has been cooperating.

The aim of the leaks, he argued, is “making me toxic so that they can make the argument to the Republicans, ‘This guy is toxic. Don’t do business with him. Don’t take his money.’ Not all government employees are leakers, but most of the leakers are government employees.”

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